A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  Nash displayed a rather curious inconsistency in his attitude and behavior toward his son. At the time of his birth, he had reacted in neither of the ways one might have expected of a young man confronted with the pregnancy of a woman with whom he has recently begun sleeping, eschewing both the high road that would have led to a shotgun wedding, as well as the more commonly elected low road of flat-out denying his paternity and simply vanishing from his girlfriend’s life.

  He doubtless behaved selfishly, even callously. His son and others later attributed his acknowledgment of paternity and desire to maintain a bond, even while failing to protect his child from poverty and periodic separation from his mother, to a pure narcissism. But even if this is partly true, it is natural to conclude that Nash, like the rest of us, needed to love and to be loved, and that a tiny, helpless infant, his son, drew him irresistibly.

  In 1959, when Nash suddenly disappeared from John David’s life altogether, a badly wrapped, broken-up package arrived one day containing a smashed but beautifully made wooden airplane, “a lovely thing,” as John David later recalled. “There was no return address, or note or anything, but I knew it was from my father.”44

  24

  Jack

  NASH MET JACK BRICKER in the fall of 1952 in the MIT common room. Bricker, a first-year graduate student from New York, knew Newman and some of the others from City College’s math table and quickly became one of the regulars in the common room.1

  Just two years Nash’s junior, Bricker was immediately dazzled by Nash. He was “mesmerized,” “hypnotized,” and “enamored,” a few of the words contemporaries used to describe his reaction to Nash. Bricker “was overwhelmed by Nash’s smartness,” Mattuck said in 1997. “Nash was the smartest person he’d ever met. He worshiped Nash’s intellect.”2 It wasn’t only Nash’s intellect, though. It was everything else too: the southern breeding, Princeton pedigree, good looks, and selfconfidence.

  Bricker, by contrast, was short, skinny, full of angst.3 He had grown up poor in Brooklyn; he still dressed badly, was often broke, and fretted over his lack of experience with girls. Although he was undeniably bright — the logician Emil Post considered him the best mathematician in his class at City — his self-doubt bordered on the pathological. “There’s no hope” and “It’s useless” were his most-often-used expressions. Yet he was endearing in his own way. His sense of humor — dark, self-deprecating, very New York — was always on tap even when he was depressed, which was much of the time. People liked talking to him because he was interested, acute, and responsive. Awkward as he was, he had a way of putting others at their ease. He was, as Gus Solomon once described him, “the world’s greatest audience.”

  Perhaps for this reason, Bricker caught Nash’s eye. Nash, usually so disdainful of lesser minds, made a point of getting Bricker off by himself. Bricker liked to play Lasker — a board game named after a chess champion that became popular in the late 1940s — and Nash started playing with him. “We became Lasker partners,” said Bricker in 1997. “That’s how we got to know each other.”4 Soon they were taking long, aimless rides in Nash’s Studebaker, with Nash behind the wheel, playing with the back of Bricker’s neck as he drove.5 They became friends — and then more than friends.

  Donald Newman and the rest of the MIT crowd watched Nash and Bricker with amused tolerance and concluded that the two were having a romance.6 “They were importantly interested in each other,” Newman said; they made no secret of their affection, kissing in front of other people.7 “Bricker hero-worshiped John,” Eleanor recalled. “He was always hanging around. They were always patting each other.”8 Nash himself, in his 1965 letter, described his relationship with Bricker as one of three “special friendships” in his life.9 The special friendship with Bricker lasted, on and off, for nearly five years until Nash married.

  Once Nash had told Herta Newman, Donald’s wife, that he realized “there was something that happened between people that he didn’t experience.”10 What was missing from Nash’s life, to a singular degree, was what the biographer of another genius called “the strong force that binds people together.”11 Now he knew what that was.

  It was this sense of vital connection that Nash referred to in his letter to Martha when it dawned on him that away from special sorts of individuals, the Brickers in his life, young men who were “colorful,” “amusing,” and “attractive,” he was “lost, lost, lost completely in the wilderness … condemned to a hard hard hard life in many ways.”12

  The experience of loving and being loved subtly altered Nash’s perception of himself and the possibilities open to him. He was no longer an observer in the game of life, but an active participant. He was no longer a thinking machine whose sole joys were cerebral. Yet his was not a passionate nature. Love, though thrilling, did not suddenly banish detachment, irony, and the desire for autonomy, but merely served to modulate them. Nor did it banish other compelling imperatives such as his desire for fatherhood and family. Nash did not think of himself as a homosexual. Alfred Kinsey’s report on the sexual behavior of white American men was published, amid great publicity, in 1948 when Nash was a graduate student at Princeton, and Nash was no doubt aware of its conclusion that a large fraction of heterosexual men had, at one time or another, same-sex relationships.13 Besides, he was ambitious, and he wished to succeed on society’s terms. He carried on as before. Even as his emotional involvement with Bricker grew, he continued to see Eleanor and continued to weigh the pros and cons of marrying her.

  The relationship between Nash and Bricker was not an especially happy one. Nash revealed more of his private self to Bricker than he had to any human being. But each act of self-exposure stimulated a defensive, self-protective reaction. Nash wrapped himself, as he later wrote to Martha with considerable regret, in the mantle of his own superiority to Bricker, the mantle of “the great mathematician.”14 He took to belittling Bricker just as he belittled Eleanor. “He was beautifully sweet one moment and very bitter the next,” Bricker recalled in 1997.15

  For most of that first year, Bricker was completely unaware of Eleanor’s existence, like everyone else at MIT. At the end of the spring term, Nash finally let Bricker in on his secret, telling him in somewhat melodramatic tones, “I have a mistress.” Nash even engineered a meeting between the two, Bricker recalled, just weeks before Eleanor was due to give birth.

  The revelation of a competitor for Nash’s affections produced more strains. Among other things, Bricker grew increasingly disturbed by, and critical of, Nash’s treatment of Eleanor, he later said. He, Eleanor, and Nash would have dinner together in Nash’s apartment, and Bricker became a frequent witness to what he later called Nash’s “mean streak” and temper tantrums. When Bricker tried to intervene, Nash would lash out at him. To make things even more difficult, Eleanor began turning to Bricker for sympathy and advice. She would call him to complain about Nash’s treatment of her.

  Nash could indulge in jealousy himself. Jerome Neuwirth had dinner with Nash and Bricker and some other mathematicians in Boston in early August 1956. Neuwirth, a graduate student, had arrived at MIT that day and was particularly pleased to see Bricker, whom he knew from City. He recalled the evening vividly: “They weren’t embracing, but they were always looking at each other. Nash was very hostile. He kept throwing angry looks at me. He couldn’t stand anyone talking to Bricker.”16

  The relationship with Nash “was a very disturbing thing” to Bricker, said Neuwirth. “Bricker didn’t know what to do. He was having a terrible time.” Mrs. Neuwirth advised him to see a psychiatrist.

  And the very thing that had attracted him so powerfully in the first place, Nash’s genius, only heightened Bricker’s sense of inadequacy. That first year, Bricker managed to perform reasonably well in his courses. But later he was hardly able to work.17 He dropped courses. He finally managed to pass his preliminary exams in November 1954, but his ability to concentrate on his courses had all but evaporated at that point. However, he waited until Fe
bruary 1957, by which time Nash was away on sabbatical, before dropping out of graduate school and relinquishing his dream of becoming an academic. Nash’s game was just too painful to play any longer.

  They saw each other for the last time in 1967 in Los Angeles, where Bricker was working in private industry. By that time Bricker was married, and Nash was terribly ill. “He was very wild,” recalled Bricker in 1997. “He sent me a lot of letters. They were pretty disturbing.”18

  Only one postcard, unsigned and dated August 3, 1967, survived.19 The only message is “No to No” and presumably came after Bricker had told Nash “No.” After that, Nash’s constant references to Bricker suggest both Bricker’s importance — Bricker is always B to some power, 2 or 22 — and Nash’s resentment. “Dear Mattuckine, It has obviously been Mr. B who has caused me the largest personal injury,” he wrote to Mattuck in 1968.20 But even then, there are sad notes of regret. “All along since 1967 I’ve been afraid to write to Bricker except in an indirect fashion. As yet this trouble persists however the reasons why change. There is a feeling of impropriety, etc.”

  Traces of past affection, however, remained. In 1997, by which time Bricker himself was ill and in virtual isolation, his first questions were “How is Nash? Is he better?”21 But he was unwilling to talk much about his past relationship with Nash. “I don’t want to discuss it further,” he said.22

  25

  The Arrest RAND, Summer 1954

  NINETEEN FIFTY-FOUR was to be Nash’s last summer at RAND.1 After an episode that captured some of the most vicious currents of an increasingly paranoid and intolerant era, RAND abruptly withdrew Nash’s security clearance, canceled his consulting contract, and effectively banned him from the select community of Cold War intellectuals.

  That August, The Evening Outlook was full of the Senate’s censure of Joe McCarthy, the polio epidemic in the Malibu Bay area, and the news that LA’s noxious smog resulted from the chemical action of sunshine on auto exhaust.2 Meanwhile, a heat wave drew tens of thousands of Angelenos to the Santa Monica beaches.3 Nash, too, was drawn to the beach.4 He spent hours at a time walking on the sand or along the promenade in Palisades Park, watching the bodybuilders on Muscle Beach, the crowds on the pier, the surfers nearby. He rarely swam. He preferred to watch and ruminate. Quite often he would still be walking past midnight.

  One morning at the very end of the month, the head of RAND’s security detail got a call from the Santa Monica police station,5 which, as it happened, wasn’t far from RAND’s new headquarters on the far side of Main. It seemed that two cops in vice, one decoy and one arresting officer named John Otto Mattson,6 had picked up a young guy in a men’s bathroom in Palisades Park in the very early morning. He had been arrested, charged with indecent exposure, a misdemeanor, and released.7 The man, who looked to be in his mid-twenties, claimed that he was a mathematician employed by RAND. Was he?

  The RAND lieutenant immediately confirmed that Nash was indeed a RAND employee. He took down the details of the arrest, thanked the cop for the backchannel heads-up, and, as soon as he’d hung up the phone, practically ran down the hall to the office of Richard Best, RAND’s manager of security.

  Best was a tall, good-looking Navy man who had survived the battle of Midway only to suffer a prolonged and nearly fatal bout of tuberculosis.8 After his discharge, he wound up at RAND soon after RAND had moved to Fourth and Broadway and was assigned to the “front office” where RAND’s handful of top executives was clustered. Discreet and capable, Best had an easy manner that made him popular both with his bosses and with RAND’s rank and file. His first assignment was to set up RAND’s library, but he quickly adopted the role of general factotum and troubleshooter. In 1953, after the new Eisenhower security guidelines were issued,9 Best somewhat reluctantly agreed to accept the job of security manager. He disliked the McCarthy hysteria over spies and security leaks and thought all the poking around in individuals’ private lives was nasty and not altogether necessary. But he felt he owed RAND, which had kept him on after he suffered a relapse of his illness, and he recognized that RAND couldn’t afford any public-relations disasters.

  Best listened carefully, but what was going to happen next was clear. Nash had a top-secret security clearance.10 He’d been picked up in a “police trap.”11 He’d have to go. Best was a Truman liberal who didn’t like the McCarthy witch hunts, and he couldn’t understand what would make a young cop join a “dirty detail like vice.” But he was responsible for enforcing the new security guidelines and the guidelines specifically forbade anyone suspected of homosexual activity to hold a security clearance. Criminal conduct and “sexual perversion” were both grounds for denying or canceling a clearance.12 Vulnerability to blackmail — which was thought to apply to all homosexuals regardless of whether they were open or not — and, indeed, any behavior hinting at a “reckless nature indicating poor judgment” — were also grounds.13

  In its early days, RAND had been rather nonchalant about security matters. It hired Nancy Nimitz, the admiral’s daughter, even though she had gone to too many communist front meetings at Radcliffe and Harvard to have a prayer of working for the CIA as she had wished.14 It had done its best to defend the mathematician Richard Bellman, a flamboyant character who not only had a wife who had been in the Communist Party but had somehow managed to befriend a cousin of the Rosenbergs on an airplane flight.15 One of its top mathematicians in the late 1940s and the author of a book on game theory that is still cited was J. C. C. McKinsey, an open homosexual.16 But McKinsey was one of the first victims of the increasingly suspicious and intolerant attitude. No matter that McKinsey was completely open about his homosexual lifestyle and that his research was highly theoretical, thus making him an unlikely target for blackmail. McKinsey was forced to leave RAND.17 The de facto prohibition against homosexuals and suspected homosexuals was so strong, then and later, that the director of the national security program testified in 1972 that “it was conceivable that an ongoing [sic] homosexual might be granted a security clearance, but that he could not think of a single case where it had been granted” in the two decades since he had been in his job.18

  Nash’s arrest was a crisis that had to be dealt with on the spot. Best told Williams the bad news. Williams was genuinely regretful though not especially shocked. Best recalls Williams as being “very open, very relaxed, but appalled that such a valuable researcher as Nash would be lost to RAND.” Williams told Best that Nash was “a nut, an eccentric,” but an extraordinary mathematician, one of the most brilliant he had encountered. But he did not question for a minute that Nash would have to go.

  Nash was not the first RAND employee to be caught in one of the Santa Monica police traps. Muscle Beach, between the Santa Monica pier and the little beach community of Venice, was a magnet for bodybuilders and the biggest homosexual pickup scene in the Malibu bay area.19 In the early 1950s, the Santa Monica police were running regular undercover operations to entrap homosexuals with the aim of driving them out of town. “One cop follows a guy into the head and makes a remark. If he’s accepted, a second cop comes in and arrests him,” explained Best. The police rarely stopped at the arrest itself but, in an act of special vindictiveness, almost always notified the man’s employer.20 “We lost five or six people to police programs over a period of several years,” said Best.

  Normally the department head, in this case Williams, would fire the employee personally. However, Best and his boss, Steve Jeffries, went around to Nash’s office and confronted him with the bad news themselves.21 Nash, for a change, was at his desk. He did not ask what they were doing there but just stared at them. The two men closed the door and said they had something to discuss. Best’s manner was unthreatening but direct and he proceeded calmly. RAND would be forced immediately to suspend Nash’s Air Force clearance.22 The Air Force would be notified.23 And — this was the bottom line — Nash’s consulting arrangement with RAND was over for good.

  “You’re too rich for our blood, John,” he
concluded.

  Best was nonplussed by Nash’s reaction. Nash did not appear shaken or embarrassed, as Best had anticipated. Indeed, he seemed to be having trouble believing that Best and Jeffries were serious. “Nash didn’t take it all that hard,” said Best. “He denied that he had been trying to pick up the cop and tended to scoff at the notion that he could be a homosexual. “I’m not a homosexual,” Best quotes Nash as saying. “I like women.” He then did something that puzzled Best and shocked him a little. “He pulled a picture out of his wallet and showed us a picture of a woman and a little boy. ’Here’s the woman I’m going to marry and our son.’ ”

  Best ignored the picture. He asked Nash what he’d been doing in Palisades Park at 2:00 A.M. Nash responded by saying that he had merely been engaging in an experiment. The phrase Nash kept repeating was something to the effect that he was “merely observing behavioral characteristics.”24 Best recalled retorting, “But John, the police picked you up. You were found doing such and so.” Best repeated what he knew of the police report in detail. Recalling the incident in 1996, Best said: “Nash was charged with ’indecent exposure.’ That’s going into a public head and making a come-on to another man. That means taking out your penis and masturbating. That’s the come-on.” Best made it clear that it didn’t really matter whether the cops were telling the truth or not. “The very act of charging you makes it impossible for you to continue here,” he told Nash.

  Jeffries and Best told Nash that he would have to leave his office right away. They escorted him from the building. They would clear out his desk and send his personal papers and belongings, they said. It was all done very politely, with no hint of vindictiveness. Nash had the option of working in quarantine, the preclearance room located just beyond the main lobby. Or, if he preferred, he could finish up whatever he was working on at home.